Question about migrating from Mac Pro to Imac

[kalex]

I just bought a 27" i7 Imac and currently have 2009 Mac Pro

I have the following configuration on my Mac Pro
My OSX Lion is on Crucial M4 128GB SSD Drive. It also has stadard user folders like Documents, pictures etc.
All my data (lightroom files, raw photos folder, itunes library and files, sabnzbd, virtual machine files) is on 1TB internal hard drive.

I'm still debating if I want to send my imac to OWC to add ssd or just suck it up and use it with internal 1TB hard drive until cheaper thunderbolt enclosures become available. My question is this how easy is it to migrate data from 2 hard drives to one? Will Migration assistant be able to figure this out or do i need to do this manually?

Also anybody know of a OWC type of service that is available locally in NYC? this way I can just go there and add SSD faster. I'm not sure if I'll be able to do this myself. I have no problems upgrading and changing components in my Mac Pro but iMac and glass removal is a bit different.

Thanks

Alex

 

[NikFinn]

I just did this yesterday, but the two drivers were in a MBP instead of a Mac Pro.
Here's a quick rundown of what I did.
-Booted iMac and made a temporary account
-Plug in Time Machine and open Migration Assistant
-Go through the process of migrating from a Time Machine Backup and it will ask which drive to use
-You'll see your boot drive and and bigger HD.
-Choose the boot drive first and import all of those files which shouldn't take too long
-Choose the bigger hdd and import all those. You might get an error about username problems, if so change the new user/home folder name.
-Grab some coffee, going to take a while (ie 4 hours for 500gb for me)
-Log out, and log in to your transferred account. The only problem I had was with dropbox, but that was an easy fix

 

[kalex]

-Choose the bigger hdd and import all those. You might get an error about username problems, if so change the new user/home folder name.

-Log out, and log in to your transferred account. The only problem I had was with dropbox, but that was an easy fix

Awesome. Thanks for the tips. Exactly what i needed I guess before I switch i should do a full time machine backup as I filtered out few things I didn't need.

Just a few follow up questions. I should create a temp account on imac and then time machine will create my original username? What do you mean by "change new user/home folder name?

I also use dropbox was the issue a new UUID that it uses? what was the fix for that?

Thanks

Alex

 

[NikFinn]

Awesome. Thanks for the tips. Exactly what i needed I guess before I switch i should do a full time machine backup as I filtered out few things I didn't need.

Just a few follow up questions. I should create a temp account on imac and then time machine will create my original username? What do you mean by "change new user/home folder name?

I also use dropbox was the issue a new UUID that it uses? what was the fix for that?

Thanks

Alex

I migrated from an existing (that I made on first boot up) account (instead of doing it during boot up). If you do it, you just need to make an account first (hope that makes sense).

For the "change new user/home folder" thing:
When I migrated the boot drive, I believe it took something that had the username in it (let's call it uOLD). When I tried to migrate the hdd, which has the big uOLD folder on it, it said the name already existed, so I named it something else (ie, uNEW).

Dropbox gave me a permissions error. What I did to fix is in the setup. You need to 'Relink' and then set it up as new instead of trying to find the uOLD dropbox folder which of course doesn't exist.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

 

[kalex]

Thank you. Will give it a shot when my mac gets here or if I decide to get an SSd installed then it should be a lot simpler as I can just clone each drive to its new counterpart